When people think about the world’s cybersecurity powerhouses, Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv or Singapore often spring to mind.
Ireland is less frequently mentioned, yet it has quietly become one of the most important locations for cybersecurity talent, research, and innovation.That transformation is something I’ve witnessed first-hand.
When TrendAI (formerly known as Trend Micro) established its European operations hub in Cork in 2003, we became the first dedicated cybersecurity company to set up in the city.
Back then, the focus was on multilingual customer support, finance, IT and sales.
More than two decades on, Cork has evolved far beyond a back-office operation. It is now home to two of TrendAI’s global threat research teams, alongside our Managed Detection and Response, Incident Response and Information Security functions.
Increasingly, it is where the research shaping our understanding of tomorrow’s cyber threats is taking place.
Today, more than 280 people work for TrendAI in Ireland, supporting customers in over 15 languages. Our average employee tenure is 6.5 years, while our leadership team averages more than 12 years with the company.
Four of TrendAI’s seven European Legal Directors are also based in Ireland. Those figures speak to something increasingly valuable in cybersecurity: experience.
Ireland’s success is often attributed to tax incentives, but that misses the point. In TrendAI’s case, the decision to invest here was never driven by tax. In fact, the financial regulations governing our Japanese HQ mean we do not benefit from lower corporation tax.
The reason is much simpler: talent. Ireland consistently produces highly skilled graduates with strong technical foundations, and Cork has developed an ecosystem that allows those graduates to build long-term careers.
Our relationships with MTU, UCC, and other third-level institutions have seen more than 100 students complete eight-month internships with us, and over 40 of those joined the business as graduates after. More importantly, 81% of them remain with TrendAI in permanent roles That pipeline is strengthened by an unusually collaborative cybersecurity community.
Groups such as CorkSec have spent more than a decade bringing together researchers, practitioners, students and businesses to exchange ideas on emerging technologies and security challenges. Students often give their first public technical presentations there, only to return years later as senior engineers or hiring managers. That continuous cycle of knowledge-sharing creates an ecosystem that benefits the entire industry.
Cork also offers a compelling combination of advantages. The second-largest city in the EU’s only native English-speaking country, it combines strong universities with a growing concentration of technology companies, active support from organisations such as IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland, and a lower cost of living than Dublin.
Together, those factors continue to attract companies and skilled professionals. That matters because cybersecurity is entering a period of profound change.
From our vantage point in Cork, we have a front-row seat to how attackers are adapting in the age of artificial intelligence. While AI dominates headlines, the biggest threat organisations face today is not some futuristic autonomous cyber weapon. It is scale.
The FBI’s latest Internet Crime Report recorded complaints and financial losses rising 26% year on year to more than $21 billion in the U.S alone. That almost certainly understates the true global impact, but it illustrates one clear TrendAI: cybercrime continues to grow at an alarming pace.
Criminals are not abandoning ransomware, phishing, credential theft or supply chain attacks because they still work remarkably well. Instead, they are using AI to make those existing attacks faster, cheaper, and more convincing. The methods remain familiar. The volume changes dramatically.
Identity has become the centre of gravity for modern cybercrime. Increasingly, attackers do not break into organisations. They simply log in using stolen credentials gathered via phishing campaigns, infostealer malware or credentials purchased through Initial Access Broker marketplaces. Once they have legitimate access, many traditional security controls become far less effective.
Supply chain attacks present another growing concern. As AI-assisted software development becomes commonplace, developers increasingly rely on automatically generated code or external packages they may not fully inspect. In many respects, AI means more of us are becoming software developers, whether we intended to or not. That creates new opportunities for attackers to introduce malicious code into trusted software ecosystems.
AI acts less like a completely new threat and more like petrol poured on an already burning fire. It accelerates almost every stage of the cybercrime life-cycle. Some of those developments involve AI-enhanced threats. Others represent new AI-dependent threats, including convincing deepfake audio and video. The next major shift will likely be agentic AI.
For the past decade, cybercrime has largely operated through a Cybercrime-as-a-Service model, where specialist groups provide malware, infrastructure or stolen access to other criminals. Agentic AI has the potential to evolve that into Cybercrime as a Servant, where intelligent AI agents perform tasks autonomously on behalf of human operators.
That transition could fundamentally reshape the threat landscape. Attacks will scale exponentially. Campaigns will become more adaptive. Criminal operations will become more resilient. Entirely new categories of attack will emerge. That future may sound daunting, but fear is not a cybersecurity strategy.
Businesses that delay adopting AI as they fear the associated risks may ultimately expose themselves to a different kind of risk: falling behind. This is a technology shift on the scale of the early internet. With the benefit of hindsight, few organisations would argue they should have ignored the internet until every risk had been solved. The same principle applies today.
The most effective response is to invest in understanding AI, equip employees to use it responsibly, and work with trusted security partners who can help secure that transformation from the outset.
Ireland has spent decades building the talent, research capability and collaborative ecosystem needed to lead in cybersecurity. As AI reshapes both attack and defence, those strengths will become even more important.
The future of cybersecurity will not simply be determined by who develops the most powerful technology. It will belong to those with the people, expertise and culture to use it wisely. Ireland, and Cork in particular, is well placed to be one of those places.
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